


Love in a Time of Fire

by water_bby



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 02:51:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1882320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/water_bby/pseuds/water_bby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Archeology Professor Umino Iruka and three of his students are excited about excavating ancient Konoha, but they find more than they expected buried in the ruins.</p><p><b>Contains (Highlight to view):</b> <span class="spoiler">(very) minor character death</span></p><p><b>Prompt/Scenario:</b>  #26 by zinnia_23, who asked for "survival against all odds where on a dig they uncover something that should have stayed buried and are on a race against time to avoid an apocalypse and survive at the same time" and "older Naruto as a smart sidekick".</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love in a Time of Fire

_The records are remarkably unclear regarding the removal of the Leaf People from their historic home in the forests of Konoha. What records do survive, as well as oral tales of the event, agree that the town was (mostly) destroyed by fire and that the people felt it was too dangerous to remain. If, as some sources suggest, there was a major forest fire as well, the need to remove to a place with better access to building materials would have been great, and the wholesale movement of the Leaf People from dense forest to the coastal areas of Konoha would be explained._

_With the discovery last year of the ruins of an ancient town near the so-called Forest of Death, we may have the opportunity to determine the extent of the fire(s) and to recover artifacts from the reign of the Yondaime, the last Hokage before the Great Migration, or possibly even earlier._

 _Umino Iruka, Professor of Archeology, Konoha University,  
from a grant proposal for the Konoha Town expedition_

Iruka had hoped to find evidence that much of Konoha Town had burnt at approximately the same time. If luck was really with him, he'd thought, he would find evidence that the forest burnt at the same time. That in itself would have been enough for one summer, Iruka had argued when it became clear that Professor Orochimaru wanted the expedition to become a treasure hunt. ("Be sensible, Umino," the older man had sneered, "it's the artifacts that brought in the money for this dig, not your history questions.")

None of that mattered now, with Iruka and a trio of his students diving for hiding places as a great fiery creature burst forth from the delicate-seeming carved stone statue in Orochimaru's hands. Within moments, the fire thing had retreated down the network of tunnels under the old town. Iruka softly called his students, not wanting to call its attention back to them. He steadfastly refused to answer when Naruto called back, "Hey, Professor I, there's a bunch of ash by the plinth now. Do you think it's Professor O?" Naruto already knew the answer, and Sakura's hesitant, "Professor, do you have the first aid kit?" was more important. Iruka pushed the sudden immolation of his colleague out of his mind; he had to get his students out of these tunnels.

_The most fantastic version of the destruction of Konoha Town relates that a hunting party woke a great beast of fire and it became angry with the people and vowed to destroy them. The party tried to hunt it down, but they only succeeded in stoking its anger higher. The beast left their bodies where they fell, setting the surrounding trees ablaze, and headed for the town, new fires starting in its wake. The sentries on the town walls alerted the Yondaime, who arranged for the people to defend the town. The defense failed; the walls themselves burned. The Yondaime then went out to face the beast by himself, and, at the cost of his own life, forced the beast into a sacred object. The remaining leaders buried the object, along with a member of the Yondaime's personal guard, and then arranged for all the survivors to leave the town. The guard is usually said to have been buried live._

 _Uzamaki Naruto, Konoha University, from an essay written for  
Umino Iruka's "History of Konoha: The Great Migration" seminar_

Once Sakura (their best field medic) had bandaged any wounds (thankfully, only scrapes and one shallow cut, no one had been burnt), they took inventory of their remaining supplies. Water bottles were still full, and everyone had at least some food, as they had planned to spend the night and much of the next day down in the tunnels.

Iruka didn't say that they might want to be very careful about moving about the tunnels. His students knew that already.

"Hey, Professor I! Do you think the Beast knows the way out?" Naruto called around a mouthful of candy. "'Cause I don't think all those trees up there will be much of a deterrent."

Sasuke, of course, mumbled, "Idiot." Sakura glared at Naruto.

"Ah, come on, Sasuke! That thing is practically a perfect fit for the story about a beast of fire destroying Konoha Town! And if it has been locked up in that statue for all this time, it's likely to be at least as furious as it was when it went in!"

"If the Yondaime's people buried it here, I suspect they wanted to make sure it didn't know how to get out."

Now that was interesting, Iruka thought. Sasuke put about as much trust in the magical fire stories as Iruka did, so if he was taking Naruto's arguments about... Iruka paused. There _was_ a magical fire beast in old Konoha Town. Naruto was right, and Sasuke had adjusted more quickly than Iruka himself to this new reality.

"If Naruto's right about the stories," Sakura asked, "does that mean there's a guard buried down here?"

"I don't know if I'd say buried, exactly," Naruto answered. "The guy was supposed to be here to fight the Beast if it ever got out again. If the Yondaime was able to stick it into that stone, maybe they could have put someone in suspended animation or something."

"But where?" Sakura asked.

"Who cares," Sasuke responded before Naruto could. "We need to get out of here, not stumble around in the dark looking for the body of a possibly not-dead guy." With that, Sasuke walked out of the room into the tunnel, only to be pushed back into the room by a masked man holding an old-fashioned kunai to his throat. Iruka had the wild thought that he'd only ever seen such things in a museum. This one looked a lot more deadly.

"You're very noisy, the lot of you. Well, except maybe you," the man said, masked face turning toward Iruka. "I haven't heard your voice out there yet."

"Please release Sasuke," Iruka said. "We were just about to leave."

"Hmm. You were? With the Kyuubi on the loose again? There's not much to burn down here except the four of you, so how do you know it won't just kill you?"

Iruka lost his temper. He rarely did, these days, but this man with his mask and his knife and his strange clawed glove wrapped around Sasuke's arm made a good target for his rage at and guilt about Orochimaru and his fear about whether he could get his students out safely. "Since we were here when it left this room, I suspect it would have come back for us already if that was what it wanted to do! Now, let Sasuke go, and either help us get out or stay here and rot. I don't particularly care which!"

Naruto chose that moment to step into the circle of light provided by Sakura's flashlight. "I think it'll..."

"Minato- _sensei_?" The masked man interrupted him in a small voice, the knife and the claws withdrawing from Sasuke, who moved to join Naruto as quickly as dignity would allow.

"Uh, no. I'm Naruto. Who's this Minato- _sensei_ fellow?"

"Idiot. That was the name of the Yondaime. You should spend more time on real history and less on..." Sasuke trailed off. Iruka was vaguely relieved that he wasn't the only one having trouble remembering that Naruto's favorite tale seemed a better history lesson than the less fantastic histories.

The man continued to look at Naruto. "You look like him. Enough to be his son, but his son wasn't called Naruto. Are you a grandson, perhaps?"

Iruka's rage vanished. If this was the guard, and Iruka had to admit that was probably so, he was a man out of time.

"You knew the Yondaime?" Sakura asked. "Could you tell us about him? Well, after we get out of here, I mean. Right now isn't the time to engage in a history lesson, after all, what with the...the..."

"Kyuubi. We called it the Kyuubi. How can you have freed it and not known that?"

"Hey, we didn't free it!" Naruto exploded. "It was creepy Professor O! And I think it was an accident. He just picked up the stature and, wham!, he was burnt to ash."

"Perhaps," Iruka injected, "we should all take a deep breath and figure a way out of here."

"We don't leave as long as it's alive and free," the masked man said. "If you find the way out, it might follow you, and I will not take that chance with the Village."

"Village?" Iruka noticed that he and his students all asked the question.

"Konoha. The Village. Do the people call it something else now?"

Iruka decided it was not the time to tell this very dangerous looking man that his home was an abandoned ruin. "We usually say Konoha Town, not Village. I'm Iruka, you already know Naruto, and these are Sakura and Sasuke. May we have your name?"

"Anbu Hound."

"An Anbu? Really? Wow, there are some really cool stories told about Anbu in the old days, but nobody believes that they were able to walk up trees or move really, really fast or call rain or the like." Naruto was nearly bouncing in his excitement, until Sasuke clamped a hand on one shoulder to stop him. "Umm, I guess that needs to be like Sakura's question, doesn't it, and wait until we've taken care of the, what'd you call it, the Kyuubi?"

"We?" the Anbu asked, seemingly ignoring everything else Naruto had said.

"We," Iruka confirmed. "Since we have to find it before we can get out, we'll help you. I'm confident none of us want to stay here waiting for it to come back."

_The Anbu (Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai) have commonly been called 'the Hokage's personal guard,' but that fails to capture the importance of their role, both as protectors of the Hokage and as an incredibly flexible part of Konoha's military. To be Anbu meant to be singled out by the Hokage, but it also meant hiding behind a mask, unknown to even one's closest friends and family. This helped, of course, to make it harder to subvert Anbu, but it also made possible the legends of Anbu with superhuman abilities._

 _Uchiha Sasuke, Konoha University, from a conference  
presentation, "Military Structure in Ancient Konoha"_

Once Iruka's insistence that he and his students would help this Anbu person track down the fire creature prevailed, they began to plan. The remainder of the expedition, he told Hound, would be camped about half a mile from the Town (Village, he would have to practice using that name), although some of them might be engaged in mapping what could be seen of the ruins. No one would come into the tunnels looking for them until late tomorrow, at the earliest. Hound had not been pleased to hear that there were others, but he had accepted that they had perhaps a day or a day and a half to find the Kyuubi and deal with it. Iruka wasn't sure what Hound meant by "deal with"--it seemed to vary between killing the beast and re-sealing it into some new container, the stone statue being too damaged by its escape to serve the purpose again.

They fell into a pattern as the day passed; at each fork in the tunnels, Hound would take several moments, run his hands and fingers through a never varying series of positions, and then lead them down one of the corridors; at each room door, he would quickly glance inside, using one of the extra flashlights; and once an hour, he would make them all stop, take a five minute rest, and drink a prescribed amount of water. They were also supposed to eat a small amount, but even Hound figured out that "small amount" and "food" were concepts that Naruto could not hold in his mind at the same time. Iruka had expected Hound to insist that Naruto eat the same amount as the rest of them, but he hadn't. After they had finally stopped for the night, taking over a medium-sized room where they could all stretch out for sleep, Iruka had asked why.

"Minato- _sensei_ had a huge appetite," the other man said while watching Sakura decide where the three students would be sleeping, "and the kid's got a huge chakra store to feed."

Iruka blinked. "A what?"

Hound's head turned, only one eye visible beneath the mask. "Chakra. You all have it. Don't you train with it?"

Iruka shook his head. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

At that moment, Sakura mused, "It would be nice if we could start a small fire to heat the dinner packets, rather than eating them cold."

Hound looked at Iruka for a moment longer. "In that far corner, where it won't be visible from the tunnel." He rolled gracefully to his feet, walked over to the corner, performed a different set of hand motions, and then there was a fire burning just above the stone floor. Hound left Sakura and the others to make dinner and returned to Iruka, dropping back down with ease. "Chakra. The ability to do that."

Iruka simply shook his head, thinking back over some of the oddities of Konoha history that would be quite easily explained by the magic he'd just witnessed. "No, we don't train with it at all."

"Hey, Professor I, which one do you want?" Naruto asked, thrusting four of the foil packets at them. When Iruka had selected one, Naruto turned to Hound. "Pick one. If you're still hungry later we can heat up more. Oh, can teach me to do that fire trick? It would be so much easier than finding matches. I'm always losing matches."

Hound was silent for a few moments before he pulled a packet from Naruto's hands. "After we're done, I will teach all of you how to do 'that fire trick.'"

"Great!" Naruto said, and bounced back over to Sasuke and Sakura, already opening one of the two remaining packets.

Iruka grinned around his dinner. "You're stuck now. Naruto might possibly forget if things get exciting enough, but Sakura and Sasuke won't."

"And you won't either, will you, _sensei_?"

Iruka grinned wider. "Nope."

That was the last they spoke until after the other three were all asleep.

" _Sensei_?"

"Hmm?" Iruka replied, wrapped up in his own blankets.

"How long has it been? Since the people left?"

Since he'd been left behind, buried under an abandoned town. Iruka sighed. "Centuries. I'm sorry, Hound."

There was a moment of silence, and then the clink of claws on mask. In the fading light of the magical fire, Iruka could just see a curve of pale cheekbone and cloth covering most of the face and one eye. "Kakashi. My name is Kakashi. There's no one left to care whether I reveal my status."

"You're left. Don't throw away everything because you're the last one." Iruka sat up so he could catch the other man's uncovered eye. "When we get out of here, we'll need to lie about where you are from, but don't feel you have to pretend with me. I know that you are Anbu of Konoha, and I am honored to have met you."

Kakashi's eye crinkled in a smile. "Thank you, _sensei_."

Iruka lay back down. "And call me 'Iruka.'"

"Of course, _sensei_ ," Kakashi laughed softly, just before Iruka fell asleep.

_The creation of a seal, be it by hand sign or written symbol, requires attention to detail. A misplaced finger or an ill-shaped line might cause a simple tongue of flame or trickle of water to become a raging fire or rushing stream. Perhaps worse, depending on your circumstances, it might turn a tongue of flame to a trickle of water. Once a student has mastered basic chakra control, great attention must be paid to mastering seals, or the chakra might as well be unformed._

 _Haruno Sakura, translator, from "Teaching and Learning in  
Ancient Konoha: Surviving Texts from Konoha Village"_

When Kakashi awoke them a few hours later, his mask once again hid his face. They took turns making use of the ancient facilities next to their sleeping room, ate a cold breakfast, and headed out again to hunt for the Kyuubi. Today, however, Naruto walked with Kakashi at the front, rather than in the middle with Sakura and Sasuke. Iruka assumed Naruto was asking about the chakra and the hand movements, and spent most of his time cataloging interesting wall paintings and rooms that looked like they might repay a more thorough check than Kakashi was allowing. Before they came to their first food break, though, Kakashi threw up a hand and gestured them all into a nearby small room. Sakura opened her mouth but then snapped it shut. Firelight was dancing along the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, and it was getting closer.

Once they were in the room, Kakashi stepped out into the tunnel, running towards the light before planting himself in the middle of the tunnel as pale light began to play around his hands.

"No!" Naruto shouted, pushing past Iruka and running out to Kakashi. "Hound! NO! You can re-seal it, right?"

Iruka couldn't hear the answer.

"Then do it! I'm giving you permission!" Naruto was tearing his shirt off as the light faded from Kakashi's hands, only to be replaced by one of the kunai.

Kakashi pushed Naruto down to the floor, before dragging the kunai down several of his fingers. Then he began to paint Naruto's chest. The firelight in the tunnel grew brighter and brighter. Iruka couldn't make himself leave the doorway, frozen in place by the horror of seeing Naruto, of seeing Kakashi, vanish in flame as Orochimaru had the day before.

And then the Kyuubi was upon them, reaching toward Kakashi before pausing, pulling back, attempting to turn away from the men in the tunnel. And then its flames rushed back toward Naruto, the creature shrinking as the flames touched Naruto and vanished, until the tunnel was dark.

"Oh, wow, it worked! Can we go ahead and eat now? He's hungry, but I've convinced him we can have roast later."

Iruka let himself sink to the floor while he laughed. "Do we need to heat more packets?"

A small fire appeared in the tunnel between Iruka and the others. "I think that might be best," Kakashi said, the hint of satisfaction in his voice. "Make extra for Naruto. And then I think we need to have our first chakra control lesson."

_During the reign of the Yondaime, a world-weary Anbu captain and a feisty schoolteacher fall in love while trying to prevent the destruction of Konoha. This latest novel from the pen of Hatake Kakashi takes us back to Konoha Village, a world where magic and demons exist. As with his earlier novels, Hatake blends a lively romance with magic and the latest archeological discoveries. This is a thrilling tale of the last days of Konoha Village._

 _jacket blurb, Hatake Kakashi's **Love in a Time of Fire**  
_

Iruka tossed the book across the room. "Naruto is going to demand a half-dozen signed copies, you know. I can't believe you went with this title."

"I'm told it manages to be both romantic and literary, and that it's a sure-fire hit, and it will make even more money than the last one."

"You don't need to make money, not with what you were able to bring from your house in the Village."

" _Sensei_ , it would not do for a brave but world-weary Anbu captain to live off his lover's hard work," Kakashi's tone was so close to a whine that Iruka just knew there was a pout on the other man's face, even if he couldn't see it.

Iruka moved his fingers in the motions that he'd first learned in those tunnels, sitting with Sakura, Sasuke, and Naruto. He might never be as powerful as the others, but he was perfectly capable of dropping a cup of water over his irrepressible lover's head.

**Author's Note:**

> Remember to leave a comment below, or at the [LJ post](http://kakairu-fest.livejournal.com/122944.html?mode=reply#add_comment)!


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